6. A Refreshing Approach to Technical Writing Pedagogy
In his article entitled “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy,” Greg Wilson proposes a new perspective on pedagogical strategies for the postmodern technical communication classroom. Wilson explains that postmodernity consists of “material and economic conditions in which loyalties, national borders, production, consumption, and work are found to be contingent, shifting, and uncertain,” (73) and that technical communication pedagogy must orient students within those conditions. In order to do just that, Wilson presents a pedagogical framework that can successfully operate within the oxymoron of postmodern technical communication pedagogy: “designing a structure to teach a structureless approach to the structured description of structured systems” (72). The goal of technical communication pedagogy within the realm of postmodern conditions must be to encourage students to embrace their role as symbolic analysts; by shaping instruction around concepts of abstraction, systems thinking, experimentation, and collaboration, students will go on to affect change within their field of employment and become “corporate citizens in the postmodern workforce” (85).
I found Wilson’s anecdote about his transition from the professional world to the academic world of technical communication to be quite enlightening. After learning of the possibilities of looking at technical communication through a postmodern lens, Wilson’s initial reaction was to dismiss those innovative possibilities because “’that’s just not the way things are!’” (81). I think we can all agree that our first reaction when we encounter ways of looking at and experiencing technical communication that are different from the ways we “actually” do things in the workplace is just like Wilson’s, to think that the new ways can’t possibly be useful because they aren’t practiced in the “real world.” The take-home message from that anecdote, however, can also be an extremely important lesson for all of us to keep in mind as we continue to critique new theories and practices of technical writing: our students are not in our classes for job training, they’re in our classes for an education that goes above and beyond vocational training. Wilson argues, “Employees are not simply subjects of the rules in the corporate world; they also help constitute and invent the rules through their actions” (78). If we keep this idea in mind, we may not be so quick to dismiss theories of technical writing that challenge current workplace practices.
In addition to this article convincing me to stop dismissing theories of technical communication that challenge current workplace practices, it also successfully made me reconceptualize how I would approach technical communication pedagogy. In my opinion, this is one of the first articles I have read that has significantly changed the way I think technical writing instruction should function. Wilson argues, “The workplace (even more so the postmodern workplace) does not come in a neat package like some assignments or end-of-chapter exercises. Teaching our students to view the world as if it does constrains their thinking and their ability to see new possibilities” (87). While I think we would be doing our students a disservice by not exposing them to the basic genres of technical writing, I absolutely agree that students will benefit much more from interpreting skills of abstraction, systems thinking, experimentation, and collaboration to technical communication than they would from only learning the formats and conventions of technical communication genes.
While I absolutely buy into Wilson’s pedagogical strategies, I also recognize that technical writing instructors often resort to teaching through the modern lens rather than the postmodern lens because it is much more accessible to the students. Wilson explains, “Many of these students tend to be concrete thinkers, but when they do think abstractly, it is in a modernist sense: abstraction according to a specified set of rules” (87). It is understandable, then, that an instructor would teach technical communication “according to a specified set of rules,” an approach that is already familiar and comfortable to these students. Many of the students in technical writing courses, at least at WVU, are quite unfamiliar with writing, so it seems natural to present the unfamiliar subject through a lens with which the students could relate most easily. After reading the New Instructor Resources for English 304 and 305, it seems to me that this is generally the approach that is taken here at WVU (of course, it is much easier to identify the parts of a syllabus that favor technical writing as a set of rules or conventions than it is to decipher to what extent the instructor encourages abstraction, experimentation, etc). I haven’t taught either 304 or 305, so I wonder how much the current 305 instructors (Eric? Ashleigh?) think they favor either modern or postmodern pedagogical strategies in their classrooms. Could the best approach be to find a balance between modern technical communication pedagogy and postmodern pedagogy so that the students could become familiar with genres of technical writing “according to a specified set of rules” while also working on other projects and assignments that focus on abstraction, systems thinking, experimentation, and collaboration?
Works Cited
Wilson, Greg. “Technical Communication and Late Capitalism: Considering a Postmodern Technical Communication Pedagogy.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 15.1 (2001): 72–99. PDF.
I definitely echo your sentiments as far as the ‘That’s just not the way things are!’ reaction goes. That was nice to read.
It would be helpful -and this probably exists somewhere out there- to see a side by side breakdown of Modern and Postmodern notions of teaching in technical communications courses. Totally rethinking my research proposal now!
Jillian,
Thus far, I have spent a lot of time working with students on the rhetorical nature of technical writing – thinking about audience, purpose, and context, above all. Some students struggle with generic conventions, too. While I incorporate what I would call “critical thinking” skills (for example, thinking about writing situations that goes beyond simply plugging information into a predetermined genre), much of what we do in my section would probably fall under a more modernist approach to technical communication pedagogy. I’m OK with that, for now. As I gain more experience, I think I’ll be able to incorporate some more postmodern approaches to writing.
Jillian, I was also struck by Wilson’s statement that “The workplace (even more so the postmodern workplace) does not come in a neat package like some assignments or end-of-chapter exercises. Teaching our students to view the world as if it does constrains their thinking and their ability to see new possibilities” (87). What I took away from this is in some ways similar to your conclusions, and maybe in some ways slightly different. I also don’t believe it would benefit students in the classroom to completely disregard “the basic genres of technical writing,” as you observed, but what I find important is that instructors continue to make it very clear to students from Day One that with every single workplace environment, there will be a multitude of challenges, differences, demands, dynamics, and perspectives that are simply impossible to imitate in any classroom setting. I think what I struggle with most is that I fully believe it is important to bring students beyond the basic skills they should learn in a classroom to a more practical understanding of how to apply their learned skills and theories to a project. But even the projects a teacher creates in a classroom are abstract and though I believe students will benefit greatly from exercises like those outlined in the PWE guides to 304 and 305 that we read this week, I still think there is so much left to be learned that they simply can’t even begin to fully understand until they’ve been hired into a position and are taught (or programmed, if you like the tech-communicators-as-robots concept) by their employers to produce and function according to that company’s style and demands.
I really agree with Rachel here. We do our best to teach the rhetorical situation, have students analyze how documents meet that situation, and then defend and reflect on their choices. Ultimately this does prepare students for the workforce and shows them holistic ways to adapt and excel, but it doesn’t prepare them to encounter the particulars of any specific job because we teachers have no idea what specific people our students will work with that will so heavily shape the nature of these situations and environments.
Great response, Jillian! I really enjoy your openness to applying Wilson’s article to your future tech. comm. classrooms. I also really love the idea of “pretending” the classroom is a workplace and having students practice those four skills by their own initiative (of course, you’d give them credit when they achieve one of those 4 functions). I wonder if abstraction, systems thinking, experimentation, and collaboration could just be an ongoing “graded assignment” that you introduce and give examples early on and then say, “when you achieve one of these four processes throughout the semester, you get credit for it.” Kind of like Short Writes, only, they practice them without being directly assigned and having a due date. Hmmmmm.
Jillian, thanks for the post and for the request for a reflection. I think part of what you’re claiming is precisely what I was trying to address in my post about Wilson’s article. I don’t think it’s productive to think of our teaching as modernist or postmodernist in the tech writing classroom particularly since this seems to return to an antiquated way of addressing science, a notion I think Charney effectively addressed. Is it effective to teach “postmodernism” insofar as that it teaches students to question the structure and seek a new assemblage? Yes. Is it effective to teach students that structure doesn’t matter in the jobs they’ll pursue? No.